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In the current age of border talk, border enforcement, and of draconian policies that further separate and break up families, children who remain in the country of origin are rarely asked what they understand the border and the United States to be like. Media vehicles and academic papers have reported the brutal effects of family separation at the border for children and families. In order to further understand how young children make sense of their feelings of loss and separation psychologists and members of the American Academy of Pediatrics have collected drawings done by children to understand how trauma has manifested in the minds of children during detention and separation. However, another facet of children's perceptions of the United States, migration and family separation also exist a little farther away from the physical border that divides the U.S. and Mexico. This paper, then, addresses the questions: How do Mexican children in Mexico make sense of their family separation through their drawings? How are children's drawings and narratives describing how they see and understand the United States? In this paper, we analyze 50 drawings from children in Puebla, Mexico who have one or more parents living in the United States. Data for this paper stems from a 3 year, multi-sited ethnography that spanned New York City and several states in Mexico.

Over the past several decades, citizenship status has become more important in immigrant lives and communities in the United States. Undocumented adults who arrived as children, the 1.5 generation, comprise a growing percentage of the immigrant population. Although they are similar to children of immigrants born in the United States (the second generation) they face a variety of barriers to integration due to their lack of legal status. Based on over five years of ethnographic fieldwork with mainly 1.5 and second generation Mexican-American men during a period of major healthcare reform, this paper addresses how citizenship status and embeddedness within multi-status communities impacts immigrant experiences in the healthcare domain. In particular, I argue that the Affordable Care Act (ACA) has contributed to an institutionalization of the status differences and a further differentiation in the social integration of these groups of children of immigrants. The novel methodological approach and the data which emerges through fieldwork reveals important insights into the process whereby healthcare reforms have consequences for immigrant communities which I show through highlighting the status-signaling event that is generated through various forms of direct and indirect interaction with the ACA. The implications of this extend beyond healthcare, and I discuss its impact on issues including ethnic identity and psychological well-being. This paper makes contributions to both our understanding of intergroup dynamics in immigrant integration and the health implications of immigration policies more generally. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper compares the educational achievement and growth of Latinx third through eighth-grade students attending school along the U.S.-Mexico Border and in the interior of the four Border states. The theories of structural and legal violence predict that powerful Anglos have created systems of social reproduction, concentrated disadvantage, and immigration law that reduce Latinx education close to the U.S.-Mexico Border. We test these theories with data from the Stanford Education Data Archive (SEDA), which contains information on Latinx achievement and growth in all public school districts in the four Border states. We find that Latinx achievement and growth are similar along the Border and in the interior except in Texas, where concentrated disadvantage dramatically lowers Latinx achievement and growth. We also find that social reproduction is more beneficial for Latinx youth along the Border because, surprisingly, Latinx adults tend to be more educated near the border than in the interior. We find no evidence that immigration laws reduce education more near the Border than in the interior. We discuss the implications of our findings for theory and policy.

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to explore the impact of documentation on the educational experiences, college readiness and aspirations of undocumented Latinx migrant and seasonal farmworkers. Design/methodology/approach: This ethnographic study was conducted in a High School Equivalency Program at a large university in the Midwest. Data was collected during two semesters across a three-year span. Participants included six Mexican migrant and seasonal farmworkers who were preparing to earn their General Educational Development (GED) diploma. Using the grounded theory, data was collected and analyzed simultaneously where initial and focused coding took place, followed by cross-case analysis. Findings: Analysis of student interviews, participant observations and in-depth fieldnotes that include the K-12 educational experiences, experiences during and after the High School Equivalency Program reveal that undocumented Latinx migrant and seasonal farmworkers aspire to earn a GED diploma to access a better future inclusive of college. However, the legal liminality, the uncertainty and ambiguity of being undocumented, impacts their educational journey prior to, during and beyond the High School Equivalency Program. Furthermore, undocumented Latinx migrant and seasonal farmworkers are unable to change their material conditions with a GED because of their documentation status. Originality/value: Although researchers have studied the education experiences of Latinx migrant and seasonal farmworkers, analysis and consideration of documentation status is missing. This study contributes much needed findings about the impact of documentation status on the educational experiences, college readiness, and aspirations of Latinx migrant and seasonal farmworkers.

This article explores gaming manifestations of the US-centric Mexican threat narrative in the context of the so-called drug war, by analyzing Manichean representations of characters, settings, and language (English and Spanish). It argues that videogames construct the concept of the Mexican subject in direct opposition to the US subject--in a decontextualized enemy-hero dialectic--fueling damaging stereotypes that have important repercussions in social, economic, and political discourses in and about Mexico and the United States. This paper examines the stereotypes of Mexican peoples and cartels in videogames depicting the drug conflict and released between 2011 and 2016: "Call of Juarez: The Cartel," "Army of Two: The Devil's Cartel," "Grand Theft Auto V," and "Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon Wildlands." Additionally, it reflects on projects such as "NarcoGuerra," which aims at counteracting stereotyped hegemonic discourses by promoting informed and empathetic representations of the so-called war on drugs. The overarching goal of this analysis is to provide an insight into gaming representations of the relationship between Mexico and the United States, the geopolitics of drug trafficking, and the neocolonial hegemonic frameworks that fuel them.

Critical to resolving the problem of health disparities among Latinos is examining the needs within ethnic subpopulations. This paper focused on the unique challenges encountered by one ethnic subpopulation -- Latinos of Mexican descent living in colonias. Findings reaffirm the importance of looking within ethnic subpopulations to understand the complexities of health disparities. This paper reports on data collected measuring access to health care among Latinos of Mexican descent living in several colonias in two southern Texas counties. Observations are based on data gathered from a nonprobability sample obtained through a face to face questionnaire focusing on health care access. Persons living in two Texas counties near the US border were included in this sample, and demographic data were compared to county, state and national statistics to examine the comparability of the sample to similar populations. Findings from this snowball sample, N=271, suggested lower rates of health insurance coverage compared to the Latino population nationwide, decreased patterns of preventive screenings for blood pressure, diabetes, cholesterol, cancers (ie, breast, cervical, and prostate), and regular access to health care in Mexico by slightly more than half the sample. Seeking care in Mexico may be a viable solution for many indigent people of Mexican descent living in close geographic proximity to the border because it surmounts the political, cultural, linguistic, or economic barriers to health care services in the United States. Nonetheless, there are longer term questions regarding quality of care and health and wellness for this group of people.

During a class discussion, a professor placed a quote on the overhead by Lewis Terman, former Stanford professor, APA president, and vicar of IQ testing and gifted education in America. The passage stressed that Mexicans and Blacks are born morons, not capable of learning, and should be segregated from Anglos in special classes. In addition, in Terman's view, these people were dangerous because of their fertile breeding and should be sterilized. A pair of students expressed general uneasiness with the racist discourse, but most quickly dismissed the intentions of the author as malicious. The general consensus seemed to be "that's just the way things were back then" and that a very "minute percentage" of the human population is truly motivated by hatred in ideology or action. The author protested passionately by sharing past human indiscretions as well as the current trend in anti-immigration dialogue and the surge in Klan activity. The author argues that Terman approached his research and mentoring relationships with a clear socio-political agenda that included the segregation and tracking of American schools, as well as the annihilation of the "unfit" that was used to construct eugenics laws in the United States praised by Adolf Hitler in "Mein Kampf" and used for courtroom defense in "The Nuremburg Trials." It is imperative that those occupied in the praxis of leadership engage her/his students in critical thinking and provoke dialogue concerning the philosophical scaffolding of educational leadership in multiple fields and contexts.

This study examined how parental participation in Even Start programs contributes to family literacy engagement and parental development. More specifically, its primary aim was to develop an understanding of how parental participation in the program influences their reading behaviors and other literacy practices as well as to highlight observed changes and transformations in their parenting practices. While research exists on the influence of participation in Even Start Programs for participating children, this paper begins to fill the gap which exists on the program's influence on parental literacy engagement and parental development. (Contains 1 table.)

This paper examines the consequences of parental migratory strategies for children in three types of Mexican families: those living with their migrant parents in the United States, those living with parents who migrated and returned to Mexico, and those living in Mexico with parents who have never migrated. Using data on 804 children from the Health and Migration Survey (HMS), we found significant differences in children's health across the three types of families. Results also revealed robust effects on child health of the size of immediate and extended social networks and migration experience after controlling for potential mediators such as mother's general health, receipt of social support, and child's age and sex. Findings suggest that social networks and migration affect children in complex ways, offering health benefits to those with migrant parents in U.S. households but not to those living with parents who migrated in the past and returned to Mexico.

Using situated learning (Lave & Wenger, 1991) and communities of practice (Wenger, 1998) as our theoretical framework, we focused on two female graduate students in applied linguistics as each attempted to negotiate memberships in multiple communities during an international exchange program. Eleven students at six universities took part in an internet-based intercultural communication course in addition to courses at their host universities, generating data in the form of online postings, final course papers, e-mails to the instructor, and retrospective evaluations. Ines, a Mexican student in Canada, appeared to reconcile her identity successfully as a nexus of multimembership. Adrienne, a U.S. student living in Mexico, attempted to participate in practices at her host university but felt marginalized. Our analysis demonstrates the difficulty, complexity, and sometimes the impossibility of reconciliation as a process for weaving a nexus of multimembership into one identity when encountering new practices across national borders. (Contains 2 tables and 3 footnotes.)

This paper examines the effect of tuition subsidy in the form of in-state tuition to undocumented students on the education of noncitizen Mexican young adults. The policy is found to be associated with a 2.5 percentage point increase in college enrollment (base mean = 8%), a 3.7 percentage point increase in the proportion of students with at least some college education (base mean = 10%), and a 1.3 percentage point increase in the proportion with at least an associate degree (base mean = 4%). These results are robust to a variety of specifications. When the analysis is restricted to samples more likely to be affected by the policy, point estimates become larger. The study finds no evidence that in-state tuition policy for the undocumented adversely affects the educational outcomes of natives. (Contains 5 tables, 1 figure, and 27 footnotes.)

Children of Mexican immigrant families represent the largest segment of immigrant children in the U.S. Achievement gaps of Mexican immigrant children compared to their peers present at the beginning of kindergarten persist throughout the K-12 years. These achievement differences are partly influenced by the level cultural and linguistic sensitivity in the school. This paper explores the cultural context of schooling at a public primary school in Mexico via field observations and interviews with students, teachers, school administrators, and parents. Findings are couched in the context of improving practices and policies in U.S. schools that serve Mexican immigrant children. (Contains 2 tables and 7 figures.)

Half a million Mexicans left Mexico during the Mexican Revolution (1910-1920), and another half a million left in the 1920s. San Antonio became home to the largest Mexican community in Texas; new immigrants joined both older immigrants and Mexican Americans. Some looked to the United States as the focus of their new lives while others promoted a Mexican identity based on the nationalist rhetoric of the Mexican Revolution. This paper looks at the latter and the institutions that supported it in San Antonio--La Prensa newspaper, the mutualistas, and the Mexican consulate--to understand how the ideology of México de Afuera worked on the ground. I argue that, more than simply a conservative ideology, México de Afuera enjoyed widespread support because it fit into migrants' worldviews. Central to the idea of México de Afuera was the belief that people would return to Mexico one day. The Great Depression put this to the test and led nearly every Mexican organization in Texas to support and organize repatriation. México de Afuera ultimately hindered the creation of a forceful defense of Mexican migrants as members of the US polity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Neighbourhoods are important contexts for the socialization and adaptation of immigrant youth. They provide resources and opportunities for positive interactions with peers and non-family adults. But neighbourhoods differ systemically in their demographic composition and the type and quality of resources they offer young people. In the US, there is an implicit assumption equating suburban neighbourhoods with better schools, more jobs and higher quality housing compared to urban neighbourhoods. There is however, little explicit empirical evidence of how such differences may shape the experience of immigrant youth. This gap is concerning in light of recent trends of immigrants to move directly to the suburbs. The first part of the paper reviews the literatures on immigrant adaptation and neighbourhood effects. Drawing on two qualitative studies, the second part of the paper illustrates mechanisms through which suburban and urban neighbourhoods may influence the socialization and adaptation of immigrant youth growing up in them. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper constructs and tests a model that incorporates relative deprivation into the migration decision. Relatively deprived individuals view their situations as less than a community standard. Another innovation of this paper is the utilization of a cluster approach to wage differentials. This cluster method takes account of individual characteristics while avoiding the severe multicollinearity problems inherent in the standard wage equation approach. Using data from the Mexican Migration Project, relative deprivation is found to be a significant motivating factor in domestic migration decisions. The results also suggest that Mexico-US migration may be increasing relative deprivation in Mexican communities. For policymakers, the results indicate that policies attempting to slow domestic rural-to-urban migration must address both relative and absolute outcomes in communities. Investments in communities that raise aggregate incomes, but increase relative deprivation, could result in an increase in migration out of the community, not in a decrease as intended. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Studies of the creation of social trust and social capital indicate that informal social contact has a positive effect. Some studies find that uncorrupt public institutions have positive effects on trust and social capital. Additionally, a number of papers show that public libraries have a similar effect. The mechanisms that generate trust, however, remain largely unspecified. Therefore, research describing micro-level processes is needed to uncover the mechanisms creating trust. This article reports a study of change in social trust among first-generation Mexican immigrants who participated in English as a second language ðESLÞ classes, computer classes, and civics classes in six US public libraries. These students displayed little trust outside their family and friends; however, after participating in library programs, they became more trusting of the library, the librarians, their fellow students, and other library users. These effects can be considered a starting point for a spiral of increasing generalized trust among the students. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the extent to which Mexican emigrants to the United States are negatively selected. Previous studies have been limited by the lack of nationally representative longitudinal data. This one uses a newly available household survey, that identifies emigrants before they leave. On average, U.S.-bound Mexican emigrants from 2000 to 2004 earn lower wages and have less (more for females) schooling than nonmigrant Mexicans, evidence of negative selection. This argues against Chiquiar and Hanson's (2005) findings. The discrepancy is primarily due to an undercount of unskilled migrants in U.S. sources and secondarily to the omission of unobservables in their methodology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The children of Mexican migrants face a number of hardships and difficulties that greatly hamper their ability to succeed in American schools. This paper examines some of the major difficulties and suggests multicultural programs that school librarians can implement in order to help migrant children achieve academic success. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates determinants of the earnings distribution for native-born workers and immigrant workers in two countries. The authors, using data from the 2000 U.S. Census and 2001 Australian Census, employ a methodology (quantile regression) that facilitates measurement of the native-born/immigrant earnings differential and the partial effect of explanatory variables such as schooling and experience at each decile of the earnings distribution. They find evidence that schooling and labor market experience had stronger earnings effects at higher deciles. The native/immigrant earnings gap varied by decile, and in particular increased in the United States at higher deciles. The results suggest that in the United States minimum wages compressed earnings at low deciles, whereas in Australia the minimum (administered) wage system compressed earnings across the entire distribution. A pattern of higher earnings for immigrants than for the native-born at the lowest earnings decile in Australia may reflect favorable selectivity in migration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract A range of social and structural barriers continue to impede timely diagnosis and consistent access to care for Latinos living with HIV in the U.S. Navigation programs have helped other populations overcome comparable barriers to care. This qualitative paper examined nine navigation programs that were culturally tailored for Mexicans or Puerto Ricans, using a transnational framework that situated clients in the context of lives that bridge the U.S. and their countries of origin. We completed in-depth semi-structured interviews with 48 clients and 27 intervention providers. A framework approach guided analysis. We identified two overarching themes: developing trusting and supportive relationships between navigators and clients and empowering clients to connect and stay in primary care, which summarized the impact of the interventions on participants' lives and the approaches used to increase their care engagement. Our findings highlight the importance of tailoring intervention strategies to the unique experiences of specific Latino populations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the last 30 years, the mass transnational migration of Salvadorans and Mexicans to the U.S. from their countries due to changes in the world capitalist system, and its specific effects on their homelands, has made Los Angeles the most Mexican and Salvadoran-populated city in the United States. Within the everyday struggles of the working class in Los Angeles, an internal antagonism between these two Latina/Latino communities has developed that has divided them yet, dialectically, a sense of solidarity between them vis-à-vis the dominant racialized regime of the U.S. has also emerged. This paper investigates this dialectical interplay of tension and solidarity between Salvadoran and Mexican communities in Los Angeles through qualitative interviews with 20 young adults who are children of mixed Salvadoran–Mexican migrant families. This paper will contextualize their families’ experiences within a larger theoretical, analytical, and historical framework of the global capitalist system and recent transnational processes, including neoliberalism, migration, and the racialization of Latina/Latinos in the U.S. The exploration of the participants’ families and their relationships to a series of structural and cultural factors that ground both communities, such as racialized labor market competition, migration, and national belonging, may assist in explaining this dialectical interplay of tension and solidarity. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The US government has simultaneously increased efforts to close its border to unauthorized migrants, and opened the border to increasing flows of tourists from Mexico. In this paper I focus on the experiences of Mexican tourists who are able to freely cross the USA–Mexico border with US visas, given that their unique status as tourists from Mexico is an important element to consider because it organizes their daily lives, their moral understandings, and their experiences across the USA–Mexico border. I show how Global South cosmopolitans from Mexico benefit from class privilege in Mexico, but become legally vulnerable in the USA due to their racialization as Mexicans and lack of citizenship rights. This paper draws on ethnographic data and in-depth interviews collected in the border town of Mexicali, Baja California, Mexico between July 2009 and August 2010. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper examines how, as in the past in their home community in Mexico, Mexican immigrants in the United States use a system of flexible kinship and ritual practices to adapt to new circumstances of living and working in communities with new neighbours, new challenges and new threats. The paper focuses particularly on how the increased presence of women who have not always been a large part of the Mexican migrant community in the United States and their 'kin work' allows migrants to maintain and extend their social networks. Through various family and ritual events, migrants integrate new friends and acquaintances with new resources into their social networks and thus facilitate their survival in their new home. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The 1986 US Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA) was directed at tackling the problem of growing unauthorized migration through legalization of unauthorized immigrants, increasing border security and sanctioning employers who hired unauthorized immigrants. Our paper investigates how the IRCA affected the migration dynamics of male Mexican immigrants focusing on their age of onset of migration and the duration of their first trip. We find that the IRCA reduced unauthorized migration to the US while it does not seem to have had a significant effect on the return rate from the US to Mexico of undocumented male immigrants. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper proposes a method for summarizing the pace of advancement of the foreign-born population in a given period. The method standardizes for variations in the duration of residence or age composition of immigrant groups, attainments possessed by different groups when first observed after entry, and other temporal effects on measured advances, forming an index of Expected Lifetime Advance based on the pace of change in a period. The measure is applied to Mexican and Asian immigrants. Between the 1980s and the 1990s, the rates of advancement for Mexicans accelerated in six out of seven social, economic, and civic outcomes. Rates of advancement for Asians were similar in both decades. A worked example of the calculation of the index can be found in an Excel workbook published with the paper. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the role of migration networks in determining self-selection patterns of Mexico-U.S. migration. A simple theoretical framework shows the impact of networks on migration incentives at different education levels and how this affects the composition of migrant skills. Empirically, we find positive or education-neutral selection in communities with weak migrant networks but negative self-selection in communities with stronger networks. This is consistent with high migration costs driving positive or intermediate self-selection, as advocated by Chiquiar and Hanson (2005), and with negative self-selection being driven by lower returns to education in the United States than in Mexico, as advocated by Borjas (1987). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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